The Last Houseparty (23 page)

“I can see that it would explain Harry writing to my mother. It does not explain Vincent writing to Purser, or to Perring's.”

“It does too. Struck me soon as you showed me those letters. You see, another thing about war, there's days and days—weeks and weeks—sitting round doing damn all. Talk, play cards, kip, kick an old ball around, but mostly talk. Any story worth telling gets itself told, and I'd a story to tell, didn't I? Something about a long-lost heir takes hold of people's fancies. I don't rightly know why, but men liked hearing that story. I must have told it hundreds of times, me, working on this Lysander, up comes this lah-di-dah major and tells me my uncle's an earl and I've rights in his castle. My mates took to calling me your lordship, and what's more, if they found a bit in a paper about Lady Zena's goings-on they'd fetch it along to me. Point me out to strangers, too. Oh, yes, there was quite a chance this Vincent would have heard about me. Why, I might even have told him myself, sitting over a mug of char in the Naafi somewhere, all about Aunt Ivy and that. Then he'd know as he had a duty to clear things up for you. You follow?”

“I suppose so. And presumably you're going to tell me that this is why you took it into your head to come and offer to mend the clock—out of curiosity?”

“Not really. I'll give you, when Sid Lauterpracht told me he was coming down to look your clock over I tried to get him to bring me along. That was curiosity, if you like. But when he got back and said what sort of a clock it was, that was different. A thing like that ought to be going. Sid felt the same. He pared his estimate to the bone for you, and he was disappointed as I was when you turned us down. Even then, I wouldn't have given it much more than a thought again if Mrs Mason hadn't taken it into her head she wanted to come south after we sold up. It was her decision, much as mine. I could fetch her up to tell you with her own lips. Tell you too if she thinks I've ever been anyone else but Victor Mason.”

Miss Quintain picked the coin off the corner of the desk and turned it over, studying it with a vague air, as if considering her next move, as if in fact having previously thought out the possibilities this far, but not having been able to plan beyond here. Suddenly she glanced up at Mr Mason, moving the coin an inch or so towards him as she did so. Her eyebrows asked the question. He shook his head.

“Very well,” she said, “I see I shall have to accept that, though I must tell you you have not convinced me. When I was younger, of course, I had many imaginary conversations in which I contrived to unmask impostors claiming to be Vincent. It is only recently, only since I have come to know you better, that I realised the boot might turn out to be on the other foot. Now I shall have to explain to you why I found it necessary to force the situation forward at the pace I have. You see …”

“'Scuse me,” said Mr Mason.

Miss Quintain had been gathering the papers back into their file as she spoke, her fingers moving hesitantly, as if controlled by a different part of her mind from that which produced the matter-of-fact sentences, a part which had long regarded the coin and papers as, so to speak, talismans and had brought them out to fulfil their long-destined purpose only to find that they did not, after all, protect or heal. Both parts were startled by Mr Mason's uncharacteristic interruption.

“One thing before we go on, if you don't mind me asking,” said Mr Mason. “It's got a bearing, to my mind. You've not said much about the fire in the clock room and the fellow you say might have begun it.”

“McGrigor? But why?”

“Might have a bearing, like I say.”

“I hardly think so. Still … It's a sad little story. McGrigor was Lord Snailwood's chauffeur and handyman, in fact he did roughly what Mr Robson does now, only they relied on him even more, partly because there were fewer service engineers around then, and partly because Lord Snailwood had great faith in him. He made a lot of Lord Snailwood's famous gadgets, for instance, and he was the only person allowed to wind the clock. He was supposed to see it kept going and do minor repairs on it. According to Purser it all became too much for him and he gradually let things slip. His daughter used to bring his dinner up, and he would sneak her into the tower to help him wind the clock, but he was terrified of telling Lord Snailwood in case he lost his job. In the end he let one of the cars break down and Lord Snailwood fired him. It happened the week-end when these things we've been talking about also took place. That's not such a coincidence as you might think—Lord Snailwood was in exactly the state where he'd suddenly start sacking old servants, you see. Anyway they think McGrigor went off his head, poor man, and came up in the middle of the night and rigged up a sort of booby trap, using the clock as a timer. He'd once made a gadget on the same lines to turn all the lights off in the house each night, before the mains electricity came. In fact that was one of Lord Snailwood's favourite stories. And then either he must have forgotten what he'd done, or else he wanted to make everybody think he didn't know about the booby trap, because he turned up on Sunday the way he'd always done to wind the clock after the noon strike. Perhaps he just wanted to see his fire.

“I was actually there, but all I can remember is the smoke coming out of the arch and everybody running about and shouting. All the guests were in the courtyard for the photograph, you see. Purser took the photographs, and he told me that just after the fire started McGrigor appeared under the tower arch. He could hardly stand. He was staggering about and Vincent was running towards him shouting to him to stand clear when the weights came down. They came clean through the arch and killed him. You remember where that hole was in the floor? What actually killed him was an anvil he'd hung on one of the weights to help the clock go. That was the sort of thing he did. The ropes burnt through and the anvil came down and killed him. It must have been awful to see.”

Mr Mason nodded sombrely.

“I can tell you one thing,” he said. “It wasn't him started the fire.”

“But it must have been. Who else …”

“You're telling me he couldn't hardly stand. Then it follows he could never have wound the weights that high.”

“But his daughter had been helping him.”

“Middle of the night?”

“No, the day before, of course.”

“That won't wash. Those weights had been wound up special, and far as I can see no more than those ones. Remember first time we went into the weight room I showed you that loop of rope hanging by the wall? I said it was the going train, didn't I? Now that was right down, waiting to be wound. Never been touched since the clock stopped. Same with all the other weights. I could tell from the rope on the spindles, all right down ready to be wound after the noon strike. But the ropes for the weights that drive the quarter-figures through their dances, they'd been wound. The weights must have been more than half-way up. They'd need to be, wouldn't they, to come through oak joists like that, and the stone of the arch?”

“You told me they were specially heavy.”

“Half a ton, not counting the anvil. Ninety-six times they'd need to pull between windings. There wouldn't be much to spare. By the finish of the noon quarter they wouldn't be hanging more than a couple of foot from the floor, I reckon. No, that wouldn't do it. But think of them crashing down from twelve feet up. There isn't much by way of stone and timber would stand up to that. I tell you, whoever fixed the jigger to start the fire had it in his mind to smash something. And another thing, he wouldn't want to hang around underneath waiting for it to happen.”

“He didn't know what he was doing,” whispered Miss Quintain.

Mr Mason sat watching her, his large head cocked a little to one side. It was clear that owing to his intervention the conversation had departed from any possible course she might have planned for it, and perhaps more than simply this conversation, this half-hour.

“Back then you were speaking about not laying the blame on persons where it didn't belong,” he said.

“But who?” she said. “Why? Even after all this time, there's still got to be a reason. That's what really matters.”

It was as though in altering this small piece of the past, her past, Mr Mason was thereby to change her. What had happened to and around her that week-end had one way and another given shape and impetus to her life. If any of it lost its apparent solidity, then everything else she had been and done might begin to waver into mist and become meaningless. Indeed for a moment as she spoke so earnestly an almost physical change came over her face. She had said the receiving of Harry's letter had been the most important thing that had happened to her, said too that unconsciously she had spent her life preparing for an eventual confrontation with Vincent. Fleetingly it was as if the Miss Quintain who had been willed into existence in response to those shaping forces ceased to exist and somebody else sat in her chair, somebody the child Sally might have become had they not been there.

“Did I tell you I'd been in gaol?” said Mr Mason.

“Yes … no … not in so many words … I'd rather not …”

“Only the once,” he insisted. “But it could have been … That's what Sid Lauterpracht rescued me from when he took me on. Going back and back.”

“I really don't …”

“I'm telling you this because you asked about reasons. I know. I know what it's like, sitting day after day on the edge of your bed, asking yourself reasons why you'd done what you'd done, and knowing all the time that soon as you're out you'll like as not find yourself doing it again. You think about it till you're sick with the thought of it, but you can't stop. If only you could find a reason you could stop—you'd know that you could trust yourself when you came out, but all you can tell yourself is excuses. If the fellow who got at you was in this room now he'd not be able to tell you why, beyond there was something in him that just burst out. Something he very likely hadn't even guessed was there, hiding in the dark of him, till it burst out that night. He might have known there was something a bit funny with him.”

“But he did have a reason. I'm absolutely sure of that. He wanted to discredit Charles Archer.”

“That's what I mean by excuses. Not reasons. Look, it's like a clock, isn't it? You've got your going train, driven steady along by its weight—that's your life, ticking away. And you've got your striking train, doing nothing most of the time, only waiting there with its weights hung and ready until a pinion comes round to a special point and a lever—one little bit of metal, couple of inches long—lifts. And then she strikes, and the house is filled with the noise. It isn't the lever makes the noise, it's the weights. The lever only sets them pulling. You see? This fellow might have had something like that he was telling himself—maybe like you've guessed he wanted to do down Sir Charles Archer, or maybe he'd think it was somehow to get you and your mother out of the house, being jealous of her for instance, or maybe something else we'll never know about, something somebody said to him, or the smell and feel of the house that week-end. But none of that's causes. None of that's what hung the weights there.”

“According to some of the books,” said Miss Quintain, “it's often to do with a man having a difficult relationship with his mother. This causes him to feel that a grown woman is more than he can cope with. I don't know much about Lord Snailwood's mother, but there was something awfully childish about him. Sometimes when I look at their portraits in the entrance hail I wonder if they didn't all get more or less stuck in their childhoods.”

Mr Mason shook his head.

“You're only working back a little way through the machinery of it,” he said. “You're no more than talking about the pinions turning, when all the while there's the weights hung there, waiting. Look, there's plenty of men have rotten mothers, plenty never get out of being kids inside, without their going in for this class of behaviour. Mind you, I'm not saying there's nothing you can understand about how a man like that might think. Take this fire, now. That follows direct from what he tried to do with you. You know you were lucky not to get yourself killed that night? It never turns out what he wanted, you see. I've been in prison. I've met all sorts. I know how it goes. The kid's too small, and scared, and then he begins to hurt her … saying he gets frustrated doesn't begin to describe it. That's why you read in the papers about kids getting killed.”

“But of course he couldn't kill me,” said Miss Quintain. “I had to survive to give evidence that I had been attacked by Archer.”

She spoke drily. The personal pronouns might not have referred to herself at all. If the ghost of the child Sally had momentarily returned to her a few minutes before, it was now invisible.

“That's as may be,” said Mr Mason. “My point is, he didn't do you in, whatever his reasons or excuses. And that means there was still all this boiled up inside him, not let off. He's got to do something. You remember in that letter of the Major's where he has his bit of fun with the police inspector, about him reading a book and working out the fire was connected with what happened to you? I go along with that. Fire. Burn and smash. Here's this whole world he's part of. It's got him where he is, made him do what he's done—how's he going to punish it? He's had enough self-control to stop himself short of doing you in, so he's not going to set fire to a house with sixty people sleeping inside it. He'll look for something what they call symbolic, won't he—something to happen in front of all these people? Bring their world to an end. Stop time. You follow me? And those figures, remember, they're mostly women, some of them very fetching in their way.”

“My mother used to say the second milkmaid was as pretty as anyone she'd ever seen in Bond Street. I wonder if you could be right.”